How did we get here?

Technology

Despite me just praising Reddit a minute ago, I need to insult it real quick. For this chapter, I was planning to reference this comment that I saw about a year ago. I saved it and I went back to read it, and it's GONE. I don't know if the moderators removed it or if the user deleted it, but it's just not there. I was so pissed when I realized this. Fortunately, I was able to use PullPush to find it again, but man, I would've had to recall the story from memory if it wasn't for those saints.

Anyways, I have a very interesting opinion on technology that's a bit hard to describe, so I'm going to start off by paraphrasing this Reddit comment. Thanks to u/Carabusproblematicus on April 18th 2023 for writing this because it may be the best Reddit comment I've ever seen. Here goes: He tells a story about his grandfather who grew up poor in rural Ireland. When he says, poor, he means REALLY poor. They had basically no technology, no money to do anything, went to an abusive school, and basically lived every day trying to survive through physical labor like carrying buckets of water from a well and maintaining a garden for any food supply. This was back in the late 1920s to the early 1940s, and they lived like the 20th century hadn't even started. By the time of the 50s, he emigrated to London for work because his sole job at a railway had closed down. He's 97 now and doing better, but he had a rough life before WWII. He wasn't quite old enough to enlist in the war, but WWII showed a lot of nice advances in technology that we haven't ever really seen before, and we changed the ways of mundane and difficult life.

For the commenter's grandfather, his life was basically the same as the generation that preceded him. Get born, go to school, become an adult, get a physical labor job, get married, have kids, get old, retire, and die. We lived like that for at least a millennium, and it's hard to argue that there was much to do in life otherwise. After WWII, though, we got the 1950s. It may've been mostly an American thing, but that's when technology really kicked off. When people idolize the 50s, it's because that was a super hopeful time where the future felt brighter than ever. Tons of new home technologies like the toaster and modern computer were coming in at full force. The original commenter grew up in the 80s and codes for his job. To his boomer father, this idea is pretty unfathomable because it's a job that's based around thinking. For so long, and even for the boomers, people were seen as flesh and bone that belonged in factories, but starting sometime around then, that all changed. People growing up in the 80s and 90s got new inventions like the Walkman, microchips, CDs, and even cocaine. The conveyer belt kept going, and this world of new technology was phenomenal. The thing is that it never really stopped.

The original commenter expresses fear because since this conveyer belt never stopped. For someone around my age (like the commenter's nephew), the job field hasn't changed all that much, but the childhood experience leading up to it has changed a lot. His nephew in particular struggles in getting a job because getting a job just isn't as exciting without the technological leap involved in it. Having new technologies at such a rate is making real life a bit more mundane, and too many people are too used to having only 10 years between the next new sparkly thing coming out. When we live with people who remember a time where walls didn't have insulation, we have to ask what we've done in the last century. It really makes one question how technology will continue to affect the future of humanity. Things may be getting old too quickly. To quote the original commenter, "...who gives a sh-- about Christmas if you live in a toy store? So where is the excitement? What is there to want?"

See, I am someone who directly benefits from technology. I want to be a coder, and if things go as I plan, then someone's gonna be paying me good money to help develop it further. There are definitely some things that I disagree with in the comment (like I think his nephew had some questionable parenting if he's an early 2000s baby that apparently can't convince himself to find a job. Most people I know don't find life too "mundane" in any sorts), but the general question is a hell of a one to ponder. Is technology developing too quickly? I remember watching a video from Tom Scott about AI which has spent the better part of 2 years ravaging the world, and even as a wise nerd, he admitted that he felt that technological developments were getting stale before 2022 with the last major one being the iPhone. I don't mean to riff on him... but what? I don't think I've emphasized it enough that we spent over a MILLENIUM living life in basically the same way. 15 years is hardly a fraction of that. Do we forget how gifted we are to live in this time? Is it even a gift, really? Man, when Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, I was a bit spooked. I played it off at the time like "Oh, VRs have existed for a while now," but I have to admit it: That thing is impressive as all hell. Apple showed that it has TRIPLE the visual quality of pre-existing VR headsets. Watching their preview of it felt like watching the turn of humanity. We now live in the world of AI craze and people not knowing what to do about it, and it feels too surreal to think about. The last century of technology is unfathomable relative to humanity's lifespan. 30 years ago, most cartoons started as pieces of paper flipping around. Now, they start as gray blobs in Blender.

AI is scary to a lot of people. I am not personally afraid of AI. Garry Kasparov gave a great speech about AI. He's the one who fought the Deep Blue chess computer while he was best chess player in the world, so if anyone has reason to hate AI, it's him. Yet, he believes that AI makes a great tool that only makes things better because AI being better than humans is not the end of humans. People still play chess even though computers are better. This is also what I believe, and while I am not afraid of AI in itself, I am afraid of what it lays out for the future of technology. When the iPhone first came out, it was like a cool gadget that tech nerds enjoyed. Nowadays, while not every smartphone is an iPhone, basically everyone has some type of smartphone. What does that say about us? What do we say about the studies that suggest a man losing his smartphone gives a similar heart rate to that of when he would be dying? Will we one day become that dependent on AI like we are to smartphones now? Will that day come soon? Nothing in life is certain, but certain things are less certain than others. I'd reckon that technology is probably the least certain. My theory is that as technology progresses, we have more people who have more time due to the convenience that technology allows which leads to them being able to work in a team to create new technologies at a faster rate, allowing more people even more time and causing the cycle to repeat itself. If that theory is true, then that means technology will exponentially increase its rate of development, and with the GPT-2 going from a new AI program that only programming nerds could understand to ChatGPT being easy-to-use and becoming the fastest-growing app of all time alongside that in less than a decade, I fear that I may be right.

On a personal level, I love technology, but I'd be remiss not to talk about this while everyone else seems to be neglecting or unaware of the idea. I've mentioned earlier that I love computers to a probably unhealthy amount, but I love the world and my connection to it a bit more. I think that there is a right way to do technology, and I'm not sure if we're doing it right in this timeline. I hope to be one of the people that helps keep things moving smoothly because I don't want to lose what makes us human. I may very well be part of the generation that controls what may very well be the final frontier of technology, and that's quite the duty. I feel so small in this world at times.